The hit 1970s musical Jesus Christ Superstar is under investigation in Russia as prosecutors try to decide whether it is offensive to devout Christians.

St Petersburg's Rock Opera company was due to perform the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical at the Philharmonic in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don on October 18.

The classic has been regularly performed in Russia for decades, but now the theatre concerned has stopped selling tickets, NTV television said.

Russian prosecutors started a investigation after a group of local residents complained the show presented a distorted image of Jesus Christ.

"A probe is under way, and subsequently the appropriate decision will be taken," a spokesperson for the Rostov prosecutors told the Interfax news agency.

"We are shocked that someone has demanded that the musical be cancelled," an employee of the Philharmonic told the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

The employee said the show had already been performed in Rostov five times and had been sold out on the last occasion.

The complaint, sent by 18 local residents to the prosecutors and the theatre, said that the "image of Christ presented in the opera is false from the point of view of Christianity", local media reported.

"As it stands, the work is a profanity," it added.

Image Caption:Rice and Lloyd Webber with the show's gold and platinum records in 1973.

The controversy over the performance comes at a time of heightened tensions in Russia been religious believers and secular activists after the conviction of feminist punk rockers Pussy Riot for performing in the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

"This show has been performed by our theatre for 20 years," one of Rock Opera's actresses Maria Klimova was quoted as saying by the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets.

"People come to know this story - generations. There is nothing insulting in this work. It is his (Lloyd Webber's) version of the story. This is all some kind of misunderstanding," she said.

A Church spokesman said that the Russian Orthodox Church had nothing to do with the request to ban the musical.

"The so-called Orthodox activists are expressing only their own opinion which is not shared by the Church," Igor Petrovsky, spokesman for the Church in the Rostov region said, quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda.

He said many priests and believers had been grateful to hear the musical in the 1980s when it was first performed in the atheist Soviet Union and "hear something nice and beautiful about Christ".

Jesus Christ Superstar has been a major, worldwide hit since its first performance in the early 1970s. It tells the story of events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus.